SEATTLE _ MacKenzie Scott sees the $60.4 billion she's accumulated through her ownership of Amazon as "the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others."
On Tuesday, a day before her ex-husband, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, is scheduled to testify in front of a congressional committee investigating whether the company has too much power, Scott announced nearly $1.68 billion in donations to 116 nonprofits, universities and other organizations working on racial, gender and LGBTQ+ equity, economic mobility, functional democracy, global development, climate change and other purposes.
Last year, Scott took the Giving Pledge _ a program begun a decade ago by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett _ in which the world's wealthy promise to give away at least half of their wealth. Scott's total, estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has increased by some $23.3 billion this year alone, ranking her 13th on the list. Bezos, who tops the list, is worth an estimated $181 billion, followed by Bill Gates, at $118 billion.
U.S. billionaires as a group saw their wealth spike, mainly on the surging stock prices of the companies they founded or own large portions of, even as most of the world suffers from a devastating pandemic and economic collapse.
"Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror," Scott wrote in a Medium post announcing what she described as an update on her ongoing philanthropic work, which will continue for years. "Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable."
